Forget about Aadhaar, look at what Facebook’s doing
While the European Court of Justice has just delivered a verdict on privacy that should cheer the hearts of the anti-Aadhaar brigade – it has scrapped the ‘Safe Harbor Agreement’ between the US and EU – the origins of the case should chill them.
By: Sarthak Ray | New Delhi | October 8, 2015 7:08 PM
All those worried about the possible invasion of their privacy under Aadhaar would do well to keep in mind social media sites like Facebook – India has 11 crore users of Facebook – or Google for that matter, have a lot more information about them, where they hang out, their likes, dislikes, and the lot.
While the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has just delivered a verdict on privacy that should cheer the hearts of the anti-Aadhaar brigade – it has scrapped the ‘Safe Harbor Agreement’ between the US and EU – the origins of the case should chill them. The case stems from an Austrian law student, Maximilian (Max) Schrems experience with Facebook in 2011 – when Max asked Facebook for the data it had on him, to his horror he was given 1,200 pages of data including certain bits he had deleted!
So all those worried about the possible invasion of their privacy under Aadhaar would do well to keep in mind social media sites like Facebook – India has 11 crore users of Facebook – or Google for that matter, have a lot more information about them, where they hang out, their likes, dislikes, and the lot. While this is not to say India should not have a privacy law, keep in mind Aadhaar officials aver their database is not an invasion of privacy since it cannot be queried on any transaction details of users, it merely authenticates biometrics on request. Hopefully, this will be proved to the Supreme Court which will be hearing the matter soon.
Max heard an official of the Facebook legal team speak about Facebook’s compliance with EU privacy laws as tenable under the UE-EU ‘Safe Harbor Agreement’. Convinced that ‘Safe Harbor’ allowed the social media giant to circumvent EU’s much stricter data protection laws, Schrems asked the company to submit all the data it held about him (he remains a Facebook user to date, as also having a Twitter presence) in 2011.
Schrems then approached Ireland’s data regulator, the Irish Data Commissioner — Facebook’s European headquarters are in Dublin — to get Facebook to stop sending data to the US, saying that the country did not provide sufficient safeguards for user data; he based this inference on the Edward Snowden leaks on the NSA’s Prism programme that allowed the surveillance agency to directly access information from Facebook, Microsoft, Google and other digital companies. But the case was thrown out by the data regulator as “frivolous and vexatious”, in the backdrop of the Safe Harbor agreement. Upon appeal in the European Court of Justice, however, Schrems’ argument was upheld. Europe’s highest court also found the Safe Harbor framework itself to be in violation of the Union’s and some member countries’ strict privacy laws. As per the agreement, US firms listed under the Safe Harbor framework could transfer EU citizens’ data to the US — while remaining consistent with the EU Data Protection Directive — by providing a self-certification to the US department of commerce that they are compliant with the EU privacy protection standards. The enforcement of the certification was left with the US Federal Trade Commission.
Essentially, the agreement set a US watchdog to check if American tech companies were sticking to European laws on privacy with respect to EU users. Safe Harbor-listed firms (including those tagged “not current” or no longer assured the benefits of Safe Harbor) include the usual suspects like Facebook, Google, Twitter and other firms handling sensitive information like 67 accounting firms (including the likes of Grant Thornton), 242 financial services firms and 60 insurance firms (including MetLife, Inc and all its US subsidiaries listed as a single party). There are 5,479 US firms, spanning industries from advertising services to defence equipment, lawn and garden equipment to veterinary equipment and supplies in this list.
First Published on October 08, 2015 7:08 pm